Lenovo W510

So my Lenovo W510 showed up before the July 4 holiday weekend and I have to say that I’m definitely pleased to have waited on the FHD screen – it’s phenomenal.

Why did I buy a W510 after buying a Lenovo T410? Easy, the W510 is a workhorse with it’s quad core i7 820QM processor and 16GB of DDR3 RAM. Swapping out the stock 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive with a Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB hard drive was a no brainer after seeing the solid performance the drive provided as an external eSATA drive for virtual machine work. Toss in the Silverstone DS221 dual drive eSATA/USB 2.5” RAID enclosure and find pure bliss when working with VMs (note, don’t hit the reset button unless you really wanna blow your data away).

Overall, definitely a decent procurement to continue furthering on local SharePoint 2010 development rather than using RackSpace Cloud or Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Computing. While both services are great and easy to use, neither really give me the ability to “toy” with technology as I need – but definitely still use them for demonstrations for organizations as needed.

So bottom line, the only thing that could be a bit sweeter – a smaller brick power supply, alas, I’ll live with the 135W power supply for now (good luck ordering a second one, they’re not available through Lenovo right now). Something that would be a nice to have that hasn’t come out yet – Privacy Filter.